Saturday, September 29, 2012

Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

Pictures beat words: In August, U.S. smartphone owners visited Instagram from their smartphones more frequently and for longer periods of time than they visited Twitter.

While Twitter may have had a greater number of smartphone users visiting its site (via the mobile Web and via Twitter apps), Instagram’s users appear to be returning to the site on a more frequent basis, and spending longer on the site each time they return.

Above all else, it speaks to the ongoing mobile issues of Facebook, now the parent company of Instagram. The massive shift in user traffic to mobile devices is a real thing, and Facebook seems to now hold an asset in the highly popular Instagram. The trick now, however, is to figure out a way to effectively monetize Instagram and the Facebook mobile experience.

o be clear, using the app for what it’s advertised for — scanning barcodes — works as intended. But getting to that point was more complex than expected. In all, the app feels incomplete and perhaps rushed. In other words, it doesn’t feel like an Apple product yet.

the map mess demonstrates why circumstances are turning against Apple's current business model. Simply, content is king again. However much it might benefit Apple's business model to force users to patronize its own maps app, the company won't get far in trying to deny them Google's far superior app. Apple for a while managed to tame the power of content and make it subservient, but that day is coming to an end.

there is no solution to TV that will let Apple keep doing what it has been doing

Apple's fans imagine the company can do for TV what it did for music: breaking up the existing distribution model. Forget about it. Television is about to demonstrate the inadequacy of Apple's own business model.

Video-content owners aren't looking for a savior and ultimately won't be satisfied with anything less than an open ecosystem accessible by any device

To maintain its position, the company will have to focus more on giving its devices superb access to content it doesn't control and hasn't approved.

'there's nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.' And the auto industry, in particular General Motors, was so successful for so long that it didn't recognize the need to innovate, to become more productive, to become more efficient, or it would ultimately be vulnerable to foreign competition.

Iran plans to switch its citizens onto a domestic Internet network in what officials say is a bid to improve cyber security but which many Iranians fear is the latest way to control their access to the web.

Facebook is working with a controversial data company called Datalogix that can track whether people who see ads on the social networking site end up buying those products in stores.

Facebook is gradually wading into new techniques for tracking and using data about users that raise concerns among privacy advocates

Datalogix has purchasing data from about 70m American households largely drawn from loyalty cards and programmes at more than 1,000 retailers, including grocers and drug stores. By matching email addresses or other identifying information associated with those cards against emails or information used to establish Facebook accounts, Datalogix can track whether people bought a product in a store after seeing an ad on Facebook.

Facebook users are automatically included in the advertising studies conducted with Datalogix, and cannot directly opt out through their Facebook account. Instead, they must go to the Datalogix website, for which Facebook has a link posted in its help centre

Starting today, you can Shazam any TV show on any channel. And advertisers hope you'll soon be doing the same for commercials.

Shazam is aiming to make the second-screen experience so compelling, you'll start Shazaming commercials as you would shows or songs. For its 140 brand partners, which include companies such as Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, and Pillsbury, Shazam is offering access to engaged users and minimizing friction between advertisers and their potential consumers.

Shazam has the unique advantage of well-established relationships with all the major TV networks, as well as massive reach, which means massive amounts of invaluable user data. Shazam is adding 2 million users a week and logging 10 million content tags a day. Combine those numbers with information users can choose to share with Shazam and you get a gold mine of data that reflects when those users are Shazaming commercials, what kind of content they interact with the most, and what really gets them to engage with a brand. And all of that means new revenue streams for Shazam, who can neatly feed that data back to networks and advertisers to help them make more informed choices about the content they produce.

The concept is not entirely new. Anyone following the mobile landscape for the past year has seen the progress of the second screen, the ability to tie in your handheld mobile device or tablet and have it provide information about the current programming you may be watching on your big screen. Advertisers are especially enamored by the concept because as consumers are whizzing by commercials on their DVRs, they often have their portable devices in their hands or at least close by. Several other apps have used sound recognition to accurately discover what show is currently playing and then load up relevant information, along with a dose of content-specific advertising. Want to buy the dress that the star of the sitcom is wearing? Here’s a quick link to a sale at JCPenney. Watching the game and looking for team jerseys? It’s now a click away via your mobile device on game day, during the game. While various apps have had some success, none have really broke out of the pack. The key point with Shazam is that it opens the gates to new second-screen technology to a huge base of users, most of which may never go hunting around for a content recognition app but may indeed use one if the software they already have includes it.

Shazam makes things easier because really all you have to do is hold the device up in the air, and the app will quickly capture the information from the entertainment you are now consuming.

The rapid shift in Facebook's user base to mobile platforms—more than half of users now access the site on smartphones and tablets—appears to have caught the company by surprise

Facebook (ticker: FB) founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg must find a way to monetize its mobile traffic because usage on traditional PCs, where the company makes virtually all of its money, is declining in its large and established markets. That trend isn't likely to change.

Anyone who owns Facebook should be exceptionally troubled that they're still trying to 'figure out' mobile monetization and had to lay out $1 billion for Instagram because some start-up had figured out mobile pictures better than Facebook

we're a completely new kind of marketing. We're not TV. We're not search. We're a third medium."

Most of those mobile-only users probably are under 25, and it's within that group that Facebook is seeing reduced usage on PCs.

the declines were sharpest among users aged 12 to 17 and 18 to 24, which saw drops of 42% and 25%, respectively. Time spent on Facebook by PC users aged 55 and older was up sharply.

"The paradigm shift to the app model is unequivocally bad for Facebook